January
17, 2024
Only
an exceptional president could resist the endless war-profiteering of this
mammoth war machine; alas, Biden doesn’t even try.
When
it comes to foreign policy, the president of the United States has two
essential roles. The first is to rein in the military-industrial complex, or
MIC, which is always pushing for war. The second is to rein in U.S. allies that
expect the U.S. to go to war on their behalf. A few savvy presidents succeed,
but most fail. Joe Biden is certainly a failure.
One
of the savviest presidents was Dwight Eisenhower. In late 1956, he confronted
two simultaneous crises. The first was a disastrously misguided war launched by
the United Kingdom, France, and Israel to overthrow the Egyptian government and
retake control of the Suez Canal following its nationalization by Egypt.
Eisenhower forced the allies to stop their brazen and illegal attack, including
through a U.S.-sponsored United Nations General Assembly resolution. The second
crisis was the Hungarian Uprising against Soviet domination of Hungary. While
Eisenhower sympathized with the uprising, he wisely kept the U.S. out of
Hungary and thereby avoided a dangerous military showdown with the Soviet
Union.
Eisenhower’s
historic farewell address to the American people in January 1961 alerted the
public to the growing power of the MIC:
In the councils of government, we must
guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous
rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this
combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take
nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the
proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with
our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper
together.
Even
Eisenhower did not fully rein in the military-industrial complex, especially
the Central Intelligence Agency. No president has done so entirely. The CIA was
created in 1947 with two distinct roles. The first and valid one was as an
intelligence agency. The second and disastrous one was as a covert army for the
president. In the latter capacity, the CIA has led one calamitous failure after
another from Eisenhower’s time till now, including coups, assassinations, and
stage-managed “color revolutions,” all of which have produced endless havoc and
destruction.
Following
Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy brilliantly resolved the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis,
narrowly avoiding nuclear Armageddon by facing down his own war-mongering
advisers to reach a peaceful solution with the Soviet Union. The following year
he successfully negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet
Union, over Pentagon objections, and then won Senate ratification, thereby
pulling the U.S. and Soviet Union back from the brink of war. Many believe that
Kennedy’s peace initiatives led to his assassination at the hands of rogue CIA
officials. Biden has joined the long line of presidents that have kept
classified or redacted thousands of documents that would shed more light on the
assassination.
Sixty
years onward, the MIC has an iron grip on American foreign policy. As I’ve
recently described, foreign policy has become an insider racket, with the MIC
in control of the White House, Pentagon, State Department, the Armed Services
Committees of the Congress, and of course the CIA, all in a tight embrace with
the major arms contractors. Only an exceptional president could resist the
endless war-profiteering of this mammoth war machine.
Alas,
Biden doesn’t even try. Throughout his long political career, Biden has been
supported by the MIC and has in turn enthusiastically supported wars of choice,
massive arms sales, CIA-backed coups, and NATO enlargement.
Biden’s
2024 military budget breaks all records, reaching at least $1.5 trillion in
outlays for the Pentagon, CIA, homeland security, non-Pentagon nuclear arms
programs, subsidized foreign weapons sales, other military-linked outlays, and
interest payments on past war-related debts. On top of this mountain of
military spending, Biden is seeking an additional $50 billion in “emergency
supplemental funding” for America’s “defense industrial base” to keep shipping
munitions to Ukraine and Israel.
Biden
doesn’t have any realistic plans for Ukraine, and even rejected a peace
agreement between Russia and Ukraine in March 2022 that would have ended the
conflict based on Ukrainian neutrality by ending Ukraine’s futile bid to join
NATO (futile because Russia will never accept it). Ukraine is big business for
the MIC—tens and potentially hundreds of billions of dollars of arms contracts,
manufacturing facilities across the U.S,, the opportunity to develop and test
new weapons systems—so Biden keeps the war going despite the destruction of
Ukraine on the battlefield, and the tragic and needless deaths of hundreds of
thousands of Ukrainians. The MIC, and hence Biden, continue to shun
negotiations, even though direct U.S.-Russia negotiations regarding NATO and
other security issues (such as U.S. missile placements in Eastern Europe) could
end the war.
In
Israel, Biden’s failure is even more on display. Israel is led by an extremist
government that reviles the two-state solution, according to which Israelis and
Palestinians should live side by side in two sovereign peaceful and secure
states, or indeed any solution that grants Palestinians their political rights.
The two-state solution is deeply embedded in international law, including U.N.
Security Council and General Assembly resolutions and supposedly in U.S.
foreign policy. The Arab and Islamic leaders are committed to normalizing and
securing safe relations with Israel in the context of the two-state solution.
Yet
Israel is led by violent zealots who make the messianic claim that God has
given Israel all the land of today’s Palestine, including the West Bank, Gaza,
and East Jerusalem. These zealots therefore insist on political domination over
the millions of Palestinians in their midst, or their annihilation or
expulsion. Netanyahu and his colleagues don’t even hide their genocidal
intentions, though most foreign observers don’t fully understand the biblical
references that the Israeli leaders invoke to justify their ongoing mass
slaughter of the Palestinian people.
Israel
now faces highly credible charges of genocide in the International Court of
Justice in a case brought by South Africa. The documentary record presented by
South Africa and others is as clear as it is chilling. Israeli politics is not
the politics of pragmatism and certainly not the politics of peace. It is the
politics of biblical apocalypse.
Biden
nonetheless provides Israel with the munitions to carry out its massive war
crimes. Instead of acting like Eisenhower and pressing Israel to end its
slaughter in contravention of international law including the Genocide
Convention, Biden continues to ship munitions, even bypassing congressional
review to the maximum extent he can. The result is U.S. diplomatic isolation
from the rest of the world, and the growing involvement of the U.S. military in
a war that is rapidly and all-too-predictably expanding across Lebanon, Syria,
Iraq, Iran, and Yemen. In the recent U.N. General Assembly vote backing
political self-determination for the people of Palestine, the U.S. and Israel
stood alone save two votes: Micronesia (bound by compact to vote with the U.S.)
and Nauru (population 12,000).
America
foreign policy is rudderless, with a president whose only foreign policy recipe
is war. With the U.S. already up to its neck in the wars in Ukraine and the
Middle East, Biden also intends to ship more arms to Taiwan despite China’s
strident objections that the U.S. is thereby violating long-standing U.S.
commitments to the One-China policy, including the commitment made 42 years ago
in the U.S.-PRC Joint Communique that the U.S. government “does not seek to
carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan.” Eisenhower’s dire
prophecy has been confirmed. The military-industrial complex threatens our
liberty, our democracy, and our very survival.
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